recycling

Apple has released its annual environmental report and challenged itself to build an iPhone from fully recyclable materials, but it also explicitly refuses to allow its iPhones or Macs to be repaired or reused.

Claims that rare earth metals, even gold, might be profitably recycled from poop have been circulating around the interwebs. Does this make any sense, or is it just an example of recyclemania running wild?

Lithium-ion batteries require a lot of graphite for anode material, and the cost of this material keeps going up. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory may have found a way to use old tires as the perfect graphite alternative to keep costs down and improve battery efficiency.

Stop the press! IBM Research announced this morning that it has discovered a whole new class of… plastics. This might not sound quite as sexy as, say, MIT discovering a whole new state of matter — but wait until you hear what these new plastics can do. This new class of plastics — or more accurately, polymers — are stronger than bone, have the ability to self-heal, are light-weight, and are 100% recyclable. The number of potential uses, spanning industries as disparate as aerospace and semiconductors, is dizzying. A new class of polymers hasn’t been discovered in over 20 years — and, in a rather novel twist, they weren’t discovered by chemists: they were discovered by IBM’s supercomputers.